Spending 10 hours aboard a plane is never a particularly fun prospect, but it becomes downright terrifying when the pilot appears to be so drunk that he can't speak properly.

It has emerged that passengers aboard an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to New York were greeted by a welcome announcement from the pilot, Alexander Cheplevsky, that was so garbled it was impossible to tell what language he was speaking. They became so scared that a group of passengers demanded to see the man at the controls to check whether or not he was drunk.